Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Technology alone is not enough. As long as cutting corners on environmental responsibility and outsourcing pollution and waste to poorer countries is cheaper, then that's what businesses will continue to do in the west.

Just recently a huge shipment of e-waste from Germany labeled as "for recycling" was seized at the Romanian border as it was in no way recyclable and would have just been landfilled here.

From the German perspective it's mission accomplished as they can lable this trash as recycled and tick more boxes on environmental responsibility, while the truth is they just outsourced their trash to some unscrupulous business from a poor and corrupt country and can feign ignorance when being questioned by the press about knowing the truth, same as how sports-wear companies pretend to be shocked that their manufacturing partners use child labour in Asian sweatshops.

The solution is political, but fat chance getting western corporations and consumers to pay more for environmental responsibility.

A political solution would be easier if the proposal was a revenue neutral carbon tax.

The economic left and environment left are so tightly coupled that voting for representatives that are serious about climate change is invariably a vote for higher overall taxes.

This proposal by Sweden for example seems to be of that category. A brand new tax with no offsets elsewhere. If there were equivalent offsets might it have been voted in easily?

> Technology alone is not enough.....The solution is political

Sorry, but all the evidence so far suggests you are wrong. Different kind of political solutions have been tried for decades without any practical result so far. Meanwhile the renewables[1] have been chugging on with relatively steady state towards being an actual solution. Once the technical/economical solution has crashed fossil fuel consumption, there will be a really flashy political agreement and huge amount of self-patting on the back from politicians about their magnificient political solution to the problem.

\cynical rant

[1] Hopefully, hopefully with nuclear helping there as well in the end.

I think you're a bit confused, the parent was talking about a political solution to the climate change problem of which there is barely hints of so far.

You're talking about the solution to the political problem of appearing to care, which is what we've seen a lot of and that, almost by construction, don't actually do much to arrest climate change.

Technology could be enough if we have had clean solutions that are cheaper than the alternatives.

Technology isn't magic, you can't expect to throw technology at something and hope it solves the problem.

Some things like e-waste just can't be recycled economically as it costs more to separate and recycle than you'd get back from the raw materials so who's gonna pay for that?

You say that as if businesses in China and India are paragons of environmental stewardship, and not 100x worse than anything coming out of Europe or the US.

Is this eco-whataboutism? Surely the presentation of "we shouldn't bother because there are worse than us" type arguments are prevalent enough to deserve their own name?

Not at all. I was replying to "and that's what businesses will continue to do in the west." This is a completely fine distinction to make if businesses "in the east" do anything differently, but they don't. It's just not a meaningful distinction in any way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com